Among all the many books that have been written about
C. S. Lewis since the first one appeared in 1949, none perhaps is a
greater pleasure to read than the biography written by A. N. Wilson, published
in 1990. At the same time there are some solid grounds for calling it a bad
book and, what is more, for drawing attention to its badness. This badness is
indeed not just noteworthy but fascinating. Unless the book will be simply
forgotten, its badness is very likely to become, in the long run, its most
interesting and memorable feature.

When the
book first came out, the author was in his fortieth year of age and had written
biographies of Hilaire Belloc, John Milton, Walter Scott and Leo Tolstoy in
addition to eleven novels and a great deal of journalism. The work on Tolstoy
had won him an award for the best biography of 1988. His book on Lewis appeared
less than two years later and received very much attention. It was highly
praised by most of those reviewers who seemed to have no particular familiarity
with the subject. One of them considered this biography by Wilson “his best
yet”; another called it “the definitive biography”, which words were soon
quoted on the front cover of the paperback edition. Meanwhile the book was
condemned by most of those who were, or who at least seemed to be, familiar
with the subject. Their verdicts did not greatly vary, although their choice of
illustrative examples did. A couple of these examples of what is wrong with the
book were silently replaced by an appropriate number of harmless lines in the
paperback edition.1 In this latter type of reviews, Wilson was
generally thought to have practiced a striking combination of writing well and
what Pope called “judging ill”.

The
immediate problem facing us here is thus slightly different from the one raised
by Pope – which is only logical while we are dealing with a single author.
There is little point in asking whether A. N. Wilson’s judgement is worse than
his writing style: he clearly writes brilliantly while his judgement soon
betrays him as a mere publicity intellectual. The question here is whether good
writing may or may not compensate for bad judgement. And there is a further
problem, which happens to be well stated by Wilson himself. While discussing a
book which he reckons to be perhaps Lewis’s best, he observes: 2

Of course, what makes the book unboring
is what makes it, in the judgement of bores, unreliable.

Or in other words, the further question is whether what we call good
writing may in fact have some vital roots in bad judgement. Wilson’s own
remarkable combination of superior writing and inferior judgement as embodied
in this book has never, I think, received the close attention it deserves. One
obvious reason for such attention is that it could help to dispel some false
notions about C. S. Lewis. What is probably more important in the long run
is that a close study of this book is likely to increase our general
understanding of the workings of intellectual fraud.

This biography takes the form of an inquiry into the origins of the C. S.
Lewis cult. In the Preface as well as in the final chapter it is pointed out
that Lewis readers tend to be people of conservative religious persuasions.
They have societies and periodicals (and now websites too, of course) and their
admiration for their favourite writer can sometimes be seen to shade into sheer
veneration. Lewis has become something closely resembling a saint to many of
his readers – whose “religious temperament” (p. 304) is evidenced by their
breaking up into various denominations and their lack of interest in reality.
Thus an Anglo-Catholic Lewis can now be distinguished from an American
Protestant one, with perpetual virginity and teetotalism as their respective
virtues. Some years ago, Wilson tells us, American Lewisites mounted a smear
campaign against one prominent devotee of the Anglo-Catholic type of Lewis
cult, Walter Hooper, who was accused of tampering with Lewis manuscripts. The
unfairness and ferocity of the accusations are to Wilson sure signs of the
extraordinary attachment these people feel toward their own image of Lewis –
and of their hatred of anything that might do damage to it.

The truth about Lewis is not
to be found, thinks Wilson, through some cheap iconoclasm. For the truth is not
just that Lewis was not a saint (Wilson assumes a readership that has no
difficulty believing this), but that he is being revered. A biographer of
C. S. Lewis therefore ought to consider not only Lewis the man, but “the
Lewis phenomenon” (xii). The question, then, is not so much whether Lewis was
really a less perfect man than his readers often imagine. We should rather ask
what it is that makes these readers lose touch with reality.

And Wilson provides the
answer. When Lewis was nine years old, in 1908, his mother died. Immediately
after that he was sent from his native Ireland to an extremely bad boarding
school in England. This cruel end of a very happy early childhood was to play
tricks on him throughout the rest of his life. Young Jack Lewis did not get
over the loss of his mother but “bottled [it] up within himself” (xi), so that
a large part of his emotional development was arrested. His life and works are
full of all manner of signs that he was continually, if unconsciously, longing
to get back to the days of his early boyhood and pick up the broken thread.
Thus his companion in life for more than thirty years was a woman who could
have been his mother. After she had died he soon fell for the charms of a woman
who, like his mother fifty years before, suffered from cancer and had two sons.
In 1960 she also died; and now at last the time had come for him to live
through his grief – he wrote A Grief
Observed, an astonishing and uniquely believable testimony to his moment of
truth.

His scholarly works meanwhile
were full of his “schoolboyish” (173) and infectious enthusiasm for the
literature of the past; his general attitude as a literary man was that of
conscious anti-modernism or – what seems to be much the same to Wilson – wilful
immaturity.

As a Christian apologist,
Lewis wrote books like The Problem of
Pain, gave broadcast talks during the Second World War, and acted as
president of the Oxford Socratic Club, where Christians and atheists debated,
ideally, in a purely rational way. What Lewis shows in all his pursuits of this
kind is not so much a secret longing for his childhood as, rather, a “hardening”
process (161) of his thoughts and manners. He disliked introspection, was blind
to the warped state of his own emotional life, and had a fond fancy for
capturing God in words. Inevitably, he was to pay for this – which happened
early in 1948 as he was defeated during a “Socratic” debate. He then broke, as
it were, into writing fairy tales and so at last found his true vocation. Lewis
had a “capacity to project images of himself into prose” (xvii), i.e. images
revealing his inner life. One image that makes a lasting impression on many
readers of these fairy tales, the “Chronicles of Narnia”, is that of a fantasy
world which continually reveals itself to be higher and deeper and more
beautiful as you go “farther up and farther in”. Now this image, Wilson
believes, is a sublimation of Lewis’s longing for the lost paradise of his
early days. The strength of that longing is the strength of these books (228).

A “softening” process (234)
had in fact begun, with Lewis more and more indulging in introspection. Not
that this is very clearly shown by his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, published in 1955. He
there denied the existence, for example, of any connections between the death
of his father (whom he had mostly disliked or even hated) and his conversion to
Christianity around 1930. He described this conversion as an isolated and
almost purely intellectual process. However, he stopped writing apologetics
after 1948, the year he started writing (or got going with) his Narnia tales.
And after the death of his wife in 1960, while making up at last for his
emotional retardation, he realized that every image of God is an idol, and God
himself the great iconoclast.

“The Lewis phenomenon”, then, may be concluded
from Wilson’s book to be the result, not of a saint’s life and works, but of
the life of a man who with many ups and downs came to understand that the
ultimate questions are best approached through the imagination. “It is the
Lewis who plumbed the irrational depths of childhood and religion who speaks to
the present generation” (x). He did so with such force and eloquence that many
a reader’s imagination, fired by Lewis’s, naturally turned it upon Lewis. He
became a chief object, or victim, of these readers’ idolatrous imaginations. –
“Like the story of Narnia itself, the story of C. S. Lewis would appear to
be one ‘which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one
before’” (309).

As will be shown by many
examples in what follows, Wilson’s image of Lewis is at least as fantastic as
any Lewis devotee’s image. To be sure, his imagination works in a different
way. Wilson would never ascribe to Lewis improbable feats of ascetism and
saintliness. He rather invents details or episodes which will throw doubt on
Lewis’s sincerity and chastity. Thus we are told that Lewis was once caught “in
a compromising position” with his future wife by her son, long before there was
any question of their marrying (256). Wilson refers this story to an “oral memory”
of this son, Douglas Gresham. But neither in Mr Gresham’s own memory nor in the
source mentioned have there been found any traces of this incident.3

Wilson’s fantasies can also
take shapes of a rather less commonplace kind – as when he tells us that Walter
Hooper believes in the Perpetual Virginity of C. S. Lewis (xvi). I could
hardly believe this about Hooper; but I thought Wilson might know him
personally. Hooper’s telephone number was as easy to find as any other, so I
called him with the slightly absurd question if it was true that he, etc. He of
course said no.4 Apparently the idolatrous imagination of Lewis’s
admirers is, at least partly, a product of Wilson’s imagination. The
“compromising” incident between Lewis and his future wife has on inspection
proved to compromise only Wilson: the Hooper story again suggests that wild
ideas about Lewis may not only be studied by
Wilson but in Wilson. The question is
then no longer how this idea about perpetual virginity can enter anyone’s head:
for it has perhaps entered only Wilson’s. The question is whether his
imagination has not been fired more violently than any Lewis reader’s
imagination.

Two examples of
untruthfulness, however shocking we may find them, are in themselves
insufficient ground to dismiss a celebrated biographer as a mere gossip or a
fraud. What is more, Wilson might have been practising a kind of biography
which is legitimate in its own way but which I have not yet learnt to
appreciate. There is, however, no end to the number of cases where he is
demonstrably ignoring facts which are easy to establish and undoubtedly
relevant. I have made a selection of these which I now present in a more or
less thematic survey.

Let us begin by considering Lewis’s unconscious longing for his early childhood.
This longing is mentioned in various places throughout the book, either to
explain events or to have its existence proved by them. Both functions are
operative in the episode where Lewis, at the age of seventeen, discovers a
writer who was to become one of his favourites. As Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, he had long been a
great lover of fantasy stories when he first came to read George MacDonald. He
had also learnt to face the fact that his imagination had nothing to do with
reality: to leave imaginary worlds for the real one was invariably a
disenchanting experience. MacDonald was the first writer whose fantasies did
not leave him in the cold but, on the contrary, would cast a “bright shadow”
over the real world. “For the first time the song of the sirens sounded like
the voice of my mother or my nurse. (...) It was as though the voice which had
called to me from the world’s end were now speaking at my side.” He concluded
this passage by saying that on that night his “imagination was, in a certain
sense, baptised” (SbJ 145-146).5
It will have occurred to many readers of Surprised
by Joy that Lewis was here discovering a writer with a talent much like his
own.

What occurred to Wilson is
this. Referring to a source that is only identified as “Holbrook”, he notes
that George MacDonald’s early years had been much like Lewis’s, and that
MacDonald’s oeuvre “has been described as ‘a life-time effort of mourning’ the
traumatic losses of his boyhood, above all the death of his mother” (46). And:
“MacDonald was the first person who touched Lewis sufficiently to let him see
what he needed [viz. to let out grief for his mother]. It is no surprise that,
upon reading Phantastes, Lewis heard
a sound like the voice of his mother” (47).

In fact,
discovering MacDonald was to Lewis an experience of utter bliss: “...all the
confusions that had hitherto perplexed my search for Joy6 were
disarmed”, he wrote (SbJ 145). Wilson
regards this joy as a manifestation of grief. I have difficulty sharing this
view, but one thing it does explain: it explains why Wilson drops the nurse.
While Lewis mentioned “my mother and my nurse” and obviously meant something
like “utterly familiar voices” (choosing females perhaps because we suppose
sirens to be female), Wilson understands him to mean “my mother” simply – with
no nurse coming between Wilson and his idea that this mother symbolizes all
that is most interesting about Lewis. Meanwhile everything Lewis here said
about MacDonald is left out. The mere occurrence of the word “mother” seems to
have started off Wilson’s speculations and to have prevented him from making
any obvious sense of this passage.6a

Such and similar aberrations
away from the obvious occur whenever the childhood trauma comes up in this
story of C. S. Lewis. In the spring of 1957, more than forty years after
the MacDonald experience, Lewis was writing a letter to Bill Gresham, the
former husband of his wife Joy Davidman. Joy was dying, and her two sons did
not want to go back to their father. This was the message Lewis was to convey.
Wilson quotes the entire letter, which to him “reveals how deeply the knowledge
of Joy’s imminent death revived in Lewis all the traumas and horrors of August
1908, not least among them an irrational dread of his father.” It is certainly
true, and indeed only natural, that Lewis as the boys’ spokesman was reminded
of his own predicament at the time when his mother died: he told Bill so much
in the letter. The point is that Wilson never fails to use a reference to
Lewis’s mother as a springboard for speculations about his subliminal self.
“The odd impertinence of the letter”, he says, “makes sense if we think that
Lewis was subconsciously identifying Bill with the P’daytabird [i.e. his own
father, nicknamed ‘the Potato-bird’]” (268). Now Lewis was indeed writing in no
uncertain terms to Bill. But if he was identifying Bill with his own father, he
did so quite frankly and consciously – very far from subconsciously. It would
seem to be at least debatable to what extent he was being impertinent. We don’t
know Bill, nor do we know what Bill himself thought of the letter. We do know
that the letter had (“in the event”, says Wilson for no specified reason)
exactly the desired effect. Bill agreed not to press for custody of the boys;
so that they remained in the custody of Lewis. Whatever identifications may
have occurred to him either consciously or subconsciously, and however great
his general sense of responsibility and fidelity to commitments was – it is
surely a bit wild to think it was from largely or essentially private motives
that Lewis wrote this letter or tried to keep this custody. It is unthinkable
that he would have indulged the impertinence perceived by Wilson if such had
been against the wishes of Joy and her sons or of either of these parties. In
other words, he wrote, of course, entirely on their behalf. There is therefore
very little point in Wilson’s speculations. But they do deflect our attention
from the possibility – a real one, I should say – that Lewis was here in fact
acting quite judiciously, straightforwardly and effectively. Such a possibility
is indeed one which Wilson usually fails to explore.

What he does explore may
appear from his account of the years immediately after the First World War.
Lewis had been in the trenches as an infantry officer and had been wounded.
During his convalescence in England he had not been visited by his father, who
lived in Belfast. The son had found, however, a sort of second mother in Mrs
Moore, the mother of a soldier friend who had been killed. The ties between
Lewis and Mrs Moore soon developed into their living together permanently. His
father was kept ignorant of this as long as possible, while he continued to
support his son financially year after year. Their relationship during these years
was extremely bad.

These two relationships are
thought by Wilson to have been of vast significance for the whole of Lewis’s
subsequent life. Their significance in the early 1920s was (if I understand
Wilson correctly) that Lewis put up with needless penury and domestic tyranny
since he would not admit or accept his father’s generosity, and that he had
wrong ideas about his own professional future. He had, Wilson says, a
“distorted” view of his circumstances, and this distortion “matters intensely”
(75).

In spite of this strong
language, we get no clear examples of these distortions resulting either from
or into anything, nor indeed of their existence to any remarkable degree. One
passage apparently intended as an example is where the story reaches the summer
vacation of 1919. Lewis was supposed to go to his father in Belfast but he very
much preferred to remain with Mrs Moore in Oxford. “He felt torn”, Wilson
writes. “He both did, and did not, want to admit to himself that the childhood
days at Little Lea [i.e. his parental home] had come to an end. In the event
the vacation was a compromise, with Jack [i.e. Lewis] moving to and fro between
his two homes, trying in each to pretend that the other did not exist” (67).
What we see in a nutshell here is Wilson’s knack of suddenly turning from a
biographer into a novelist, and the way he leaves the account of facts for a
medley of clownish images. Lewis was not moving to and fro but simply went to
Ireland for a few weeks and then back to Oxford; nor did he pretend in each of his two homes that the other did
not exist.

Likewise, at
the end of chapter 3 we read that in 1908 during the weeks leading up to the
death of Lewis’s mother “the survivors all
hurt one another in an irremediable way”
(italics mine). But at least two-thirds of them – Jack and his brother – were
in fact doing the very reverse of hurting each other, while none of the three
did so in an irremediable way.

This technique is used a
little less elegantly as we reach the point where Lewis, in 1922, is turned
down as an applicant for a job in the University of Reading. Wilson apparently
means to give the reader a vivid idea of the way Lewis found himself henpecked
by Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen. The job, Wilson says, “was actually
offered to Lewis, but he withdrew when he discovered that it would necessitate
living in Reading” – Maureen having just found a suitable school in Oxford. “It
would have been a ‘thousand pities’ to change Maureen’s school for a year.
(...) The schoolgirl’s needs dictated the student’s prospects” (74). However,
in Lewis’s diary for 2 July 1922 we read that Mrs Moore “was so anxious not to
influence me that I could not be quite sure what her wishes were”. And on 3
July: “A letter arrived (...) to say that the Reading job has been given to
someone with a name like Mabbot”.7

On the next page, Wilson
tells us that domestic chores were an “obsession” to Mrs Moore. “She was
persistent in trying to do unnecessary tasks, thereby forcing Jack, out of
guilt, to do them himself.” Thus one day Jack, on coming home, found her busy
polishing an upstairs wardrobe. As “he tried to concentrate on his work, he
heard ‘an awful crash’ and rushed up to see what had happened. Mrs Moore had
somehow or other managed to pull down the wardrobe on top of her.” The “awful
crash” is taken from the diary for 20 June 1923, where Lewis wrote as follows:
“Had hardly left [her] when I heard an awful crash and rushed back thoroughly
frightened and half believing that the wardrobe had fallen on [her]. I found
however that it was only she herself who had fallen...” As for the idea that
Mrs Moore’s hard work made Jack feel guilty: he was that day doing things like
reading old tombstones in a nearby graveyard, in fact frittering away his day
and doing no work at all; yet he does not seem to have experienced any guilt or
obligation. He made “attempts to get her to stop polishing and rest on her
laurels”.

But let us come back to
Lewis’s circumstances and his distorted view of them. It will be recalled that
Wilson thinks this view “matters intensely”; it does so in that Lewis was
eagerly looking for a job, since a job would mean that he would no longer be
dependent on his father and would be able to live a more comfortable life with
the Moores; but he didn’t know what he could do best. It was quite long before
he definitely dropped the idea of becoming a great poet, and then for a short
time thought that philosophy was his vocation. Now all this, except the age of
Mrs Moore, was of course so entirely normal for a man of his age that there
seems to be very little need for special explanations from “relationships”. Any
further ways in which Lewis’s views or circumstances or relationships mattered
are even harder to see. He happened to find one of the few ideal jobs for him,
a job he should and would have taken in any circumstances; until that moment
his views had never been distorted to the extent that he actually stopped using
his father’s financial support. As we compare the ascertainable course of
events with Wilson’s story, this story proves to be an almost unbroken series
of rhapsodies on themes only partly borrowed from that course of events. Their
tenor meanwhile is very monotonous. It is all about how confused, tormented and
pathetic were the various actors in the story.

True, there are cases of
sloppiness that seem to have no point – details that have no possibilities in
the way of tendentiousness. Sloppiness, however, is rampant at every level: and
the border between sloppiness and fabrication seems wholly unguarded. When
Lewis applied for the job in Reading, one of the men he met there was Eric R.
Dodds, the classicist. Dodds had left University College and Oxford at the time
when Lewis arrived there, towards the end of the war. On page 74 Wilson quotes
Lewis’s diary at 17 June 1922, where we read that he had never seen Dodds since
their first meeting in 1917. Yet on page 63 Wilson tells us that Dodds “was
Lewis’s exact contemporary at Univ.” This minor mistake, strange as it is, can
be explained from the fact that the Reading college where Dodds worked from
1919 onwards happened to be also called University College. The erroneous idea
of Lewis and Dodds being fellow students, however, must somehow have fired
Wilson’s imagination: for he goes on to tell us that “they differed radically
over the Irish question (...) but they liked each other and were stimulated by
each other’s company”. And before the end of the paragraph, we are told that
Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield was “being set on the course which was to lead him
to embrace theosophy”. Infinitely subtle though the phrasing is, Barfield’s
choice was in fact anthroposophy.

In this way Wilson goes on
and on. Sometimes he goes too far also in the sense of forgetting some minimum demands
of propriety. One day in 1955 a friend of Lewis’s, George Sayer, visited Oxford
for a day together with his wife Moira. It was the period when Joy Gresham was
becoming a more and more regular visitor in the Lewis household; she and Lewis
were to get married in 1956. Wilson says that one of the things Lewis did not
understand in those days was the fact that Joy was making herself unpopular
with his friends. Sayer’s wife went to Lewis’s house to spend the afternoon
with a book, and here she met Mrs Gresham, who started abusing her as if she
were an intruder:

[Joy] was carrying a pile of Jack’s laundry. Moira Sayer politely pointed
out that she was a friend of Jack’s and that she had, in fact, met Mrs Gresham
once before. “Her mind was quick and muscular as a leopard,” Lewis wrote
admiringly of his inamorata. “It
scented the first whiff of cant or slush, then sprang.” Not every­one found
this approach to conversation markedly congenial. (256)

Now let us see what exactly Wilson is doing here. First, he is again
quoting from a source (like “Holbrook” before) which he never mentions in full:
“Sayer” – which of course is George Sayer’s 1988 biography of C. S. Lewis
– and gives a wrong page reference. Second, he is quoting Lewis from an
entirely unspecified source, which however is A Grief Observed, written shortly after Joy’s death five years
later. To say the very least, this is a precarious piece of biographical
composition. The urge to be entertaining in his chosen way is obviously
stronger in Wilson than any interest he may have in his subject and indeed than
any sense of decency he may have. For, thirdly, he leaves out from his source,
Sayer’s book, details that make hay of his whole representation. When George
Sayer was to meet Joy for the first time, Lewis had written to warn him that
“she’s a queer fish and I’m not at all sure that she’s either yours or Moira’s
cup of tea (she is at any rate not a bore).” And after the incident, according
to Sayer, “Jack was quite miserable when, later on in the afternoon, [Moira]
conveyed a softened version of what had happened”. Let us finally note that
what was “some laundry” in Sayer’s book has developed into “a pile of Jack’s
laundry” in Wilson’s.8

Matters of more interest do not escape this treatment. Lewis’s conversion
to the Christian faith is a prime example of a development which Wilson assumes
was not understood at all by Lewis himself yet is understood almost completely
by Wilson. The two chief things to be understood are (1) that Lewis’s emerging
belief in God was closely related to the death of his father; and (2) that his
intellectual concerns at the time were really an entirely peripheral feature of
his religious development.

Surprised by Joy is Lewis’s own account of how
he “passed from Atheism to Christianity” (SbJ
7). Wilson regards the book as a smokescreen. Lewis mentions his relationship
with Mrs Moore only implicitly, referring to it as an episode which he is not
free to tell and of which he doubts if it has much to do with his story. And he
says similar things about his father’s death in 1929. We have already seen that
Wilson, on the contrary, thinks these two relationships of vast significance.
He indeed considers the religious conversion around 1930 to be one of their
major offshoots. But Wilson is a born entertainer. He will never say anything
that makes you yawn. Accordingly he does not say, “Lewis had an Oedipus
complex. His God was a projection of his dead father, whom he had hated.”
However, if we set ourselves to finding some specification of the connections
between the father’s death and the son’s conversion, what we find is only this;
or rather, an assumption that this view is really too obvious to be fully
stated. Mrs Moore’s role seems to be that she made it necessary for Lewis to
“compartmentalize” his life (108). This inevitably ended in a crisis of the
emotions. This crisis, helped by the impact of his father’s death, took the
form of a religious conversion.

The smokescreen of Surprised by Joy as seen by Wilson is,
more specifically, a screen of rational argument. Lewis was, we are told,
deceiving both his readers and himself as he presented his own conversion as a
matter largely of “paper logic”9 (106); and the deception was all
the sillier for the fact that Lewis was not a very clear thinker. The latter
point is made through the usual chaos of misrepresentations, which it would
take me too far afield to disentangle here. What I would like to point out is
that much of this unmasking activity with regard to Lewis’s religion depends on
Wilson’s producing the mask in question.

Retracing this procedure
calls for some closer attention than simply going along with it. Surprised by Joy is a book which towards
the end almost becomes a list of successive moments of illumination. Each of
these “Moves” is interpreted by Lewis as the intensification, suppression,
corruption or refinement – in brief, as a stage in the progress – of an old and
indefinable longing, whose object in the end proves to be God. For the purposes
of this book, Lewis calls this longing “Joy”.10 He assumes that most
readers will not easily recognize the sensation, yet he hopes some will do so.
It is especially the later stages of “Joy” that he represents as the results of
philosophical progress. These stages are as often as not marked by very
subjective experiences, many of which he received from his reading. Thus in the
penultimate chapter he mentions, respectively, the impact of his reading
Euripides’s Hippolytus and Samuel
Alexander’s book Space, Time and Deity.

Reading Hippolytus, he tells us,
gave him the first “Joy” in many years – years during which he had come to see
this “Joy” as a thing of the past. It now came back with great intensity:
“There was nothing whatever to do about it” (SbJ 174). Alexander’s book, read in the same period, served to
clarify to him the position of “Joy” among his conscious thoughts. He suddenly
saw the need to distinguish an experience from the thing experienced. Suffering
heat or cold is not itself heat or cold; to be touched by beauty is not the
same as beauty; a longing is not the thing longed for. And “Joy” was a longing.
So he further realized that this sense of longing had so enthralled him – he
had so much longed to feel this longing – that the thing originally longed for
had quite escaped his attention. Surely that was how his “search for Joy” had
been “hitherto perplexed”. Lewis decided henceforth to pay less attention to
his own inner self. Alexander had taught him a lesson in anti-subjectivism. Its
first application by Lewis was, according to Surprised by Joy (176), that he “did not yet ask, Who is the
desired? only What is it? But this brought me already into the region of awe”.

The next stage (or “Move”) in
his development as he described it was his “linking up this new éclaircissement about Joy with my
idealistic philosophy” (SbJ 177). His
changeover from philosophical realism to this idealistic philosophy had
happened somewhat earlier, as described in the previous chapter.

Wilson’s version of all this
is as follows. Reading Alexander’s book, he says, was “something which focused
[Lewis’s] intellectual uncertainties at this time” (107). He mentions the
distinction Lewis learnt to make between an experience and the thing
experienced, and then seems to equate this discovery with his changeover to
idealism or even to theism. At any rate there does not seem to be another
possible reason why Wilson should go on as follows:

It was a linchpin of Lewis’s theism that thought itself was a metaphysical
act; (...) But of course, had Alexander’s argument and Lewis’s interpretation
of it been irrefutable, had it been the kind of thing which compelled religious
certainty, then all the philosophers in Oxford would have fallen to their knees
when they had finished reading it. They did not do so. The fact that Lewis did
is not a sign that he was illogical, merely that he was caught up in a
spiritual drama which involved more than “paper logic”. (107–108)

The spiritual drama is illustrated on the following pages with the way in
which Hippolytus affected Lewis. The
illustrative power of this is enhanced by a Wilsonian remark that “it is
probably fanciful to cast Mrs Moore as Phaedra, or the P’daytabird as Theseus”
(110).

Now if we picture the process
described by Lewis in Surprised by Joy
as a ladder,11 we may picture Wilson as someone snapping off a
random handful of rungs, working them into a rickety little stepladder of his
own making, and then observing that Lewis ought never to have suggested that
such a thing could serve any serious purpose. Or to go back to the “unmasking”
image: if Lewis seems to be hiding his true face behind a mask, Wilson is
hiding this mask behind yet another mask which is only a clumsy caricature of
the one below.

Or to put it
concretely – Lewis never suggested that he became a philosophical idealist as a
result of reading or “interpreting” Alexander (which, if he had, he would
probably not have tried to describe as a logical step). He said he read
Alexander when he was an idealist already. If there is something improbably
neat or even slick in his story at this point, we get no truer idea of what was
happening by being told that Lewis’s “intellectual uncertainties were being
focussed”. This remark may be true in its own vague way, but there is really no
more point in it than this very vagueness. Its effect is to keep you from
paying much more serious attention to Lewis’s own account. It also keeps you
unaware that Wilson never properly criticizes or analyzes or even refutes that
account, but simply substitutes some laughably naive and very un-Lewis-like
train of thought, apparently trusting his readers to ascribe it to Lewis. It
should be noted that we are actually supposed here to imagine that Lewis fell
to his knees for the idealist’s Absolute Spirit, or perhaps for Alexander’s
book. If anywhere, it is here much more interesting to follow Lewis’s account
than Wilson’s. As an idealist, and having reached “the region of awe”, Lewis
was still believing in what was to become one of his theological pet aversions
– a “tame god”. And as far as I know, when he did fall to his knees he never
supposed that his own immediate reasons to do so would be easily understandable
for many other people.

I do agree with Wilson that Surprised by Joy, for all its fine
qualities, is yet unsatisfying. For example, there seems to be little point in
the pages Lewis devoted to the details of his childhood fantasies, Animal Land
and Boxen, at the end of chapter 5. He says he includes them “only because to
omit it would have been to misrepresent this period of my life.” If that were
really his method, he ought to have followed it throughout the book. There are
clearly gaps in the story as he tells it; one of Lewis’s own friends famously
threatened to write a sequel under the title Suppressed by Jack. His friends may well have thought that he had
been all too prudish about the realia
of his early Oxford years. But what Wilson thinks he was prudish about is a
spiritual drama, hidden behind a screen of shaky logic. This is a wrong
suggestion and can therefore hardly help us filling gaps. Lewis’s book is most
certainly the story of a spiritual drama; and anyway what a writer suppresses
is never to be found out through slapdash reading of what he does publish.
Lewis compared his philosophical insights to the dry bones “in that dreadful
valley of Ezekiel’s”:12 “A Philosophical theorem, cerebrally
entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood
upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy
no longer” (SbJ 181). This, it seems
to me, is nothing if not a spiritual drama. I see no screen of logic
surrounding it. Wilson is a Don Quixote; his windmill is the mind of Lewis.13

When Wilson speaks of a
“spiritual drama” he possibly means a psychological drama. If this is the case,
it could explain why he does not take Surprised
by Joy seriously. He may find it difficult to see a spiritual drama where
no psychological drama is highlighted – indeed he may be unwilling to make a
distinction between the two – whereas the whole point of Lewis’s story is that
he first began to suspect, and then became convinced, that he had to seek
salvation outside of himself and, surprisingly, then found it. Lewis deflected
our attention away from the psychodrama (in which he may well have been caught
up) apparently because his own
attention was deflected from it. What he tried to explain was that one of the
chief facts of his life was in a sense not a fact about himself: and that this
was the whole point of its being a chief fact. Wilson does not appear either to
believe or to be interested in the possibility of such a thing. Perhaps he does
not believe in the existence of any other type of drama than psychodrama. This
is of course everyone’s own affair and one need not be a less competent
biographer for that. You may perhaps write an excellent life of Hitler while
being yourself a Zionist. On the other hand, it might be hard to write a life
of Mozart when you don’t have an ear for his music. Wilson is blind to what was
– whatever he or we may think of it – the chief fact in Lewis’s life. I am
therefore inclined to compare him to a Mozart biographer who is tone deaf.

In any case, he distorts both
the details and the tenor of Surprised by
Joy. This does not say much for his insights and interpretations, whether
or not Surprised by Joy itself is any
good. You don’t remedy misrepresentation by misrepresenting it. Wilson’s
allegations that Lewis was being untruthful, for that matter, are not very
convincing. For example, one of his reasons to think of a father complex is
that Lewis would not do so. The
reason why he wouldn’t is, says Wilson, that he feared for a Freudian
explanation for his belief in God (111). And that was why he “repressed” the
impact of his father’s death while he was writing his autobiography. It is all
very much like what Mary Midgley charitably called “Freud at his least
helpful”.14 In this way surely anything can be ascribed to anyone.
You might, for instance, maintain that Lewis’s experiences in the trench war in
1917–1918 haunted him all his life, on the ground that he hardly ever mentioned
them. And then you could go on to hunt for explanations why he was repressing
the truth. Once you have decided on that course, there are few things in the
world that may still keep you from finding an explanation. Indeed while you are
being hailed as “an uncannily sensitive biographer”15 it may be
generally difficult to keep up much discipline over your ideas. Wilson’s
grounds for his view of Lewis are often introduced by phrases like “it is
probably fanciful...” (110), as quoted before, or like the following ones:

– It would be far too glib to suggest that... (128)

– We hardly need to dwell on... (228)

– He was frightened that hostile readers of his theological work
would be able to say that... (111)

– There is absolutely no way of knowing whether... (241;
followed by an egregious piece of vilification)

or the striking phrase “Some (...) have implied to me that...” (170), or
again, quite simply, “It has been said that...” (118) – all of these followed
by mental leaps for which Wilson apparently will not take full responsibility,
yet for which he gives no alternatives. Almost all of these ideas offer
explanations and suggest backgrounds that would not have pleased any of the
people involved. In fact I find myself giving a fairly precise definition of
what is popularly called gossip.

A strong proclivity for gossip
is indeed unmistakable. I have mentioned the case of Douglas Gresham’s alleged
catching his mother in the act of adultery. One other example is a very short
fragment in chapter 8. We are reading here about some sleepless weeks early in
1923, when the presence of a mentally ill brother of Mrs Moore dominated the
domestic scene. “Almost the only moments of true repose which [Lewis] enjoyed
were when he was able to slip into Mrs Moore’s bed after she had ‘just vacated
it’ for the afternoon” (82). The words just
vacated it are taken from Lewis’s diary; that is why they are put in
quotation marks. But no source is quoted. The result is that the inverted
commas make for a banal piece of ambiguity, whose banality proves to be all the
worse when you read the quotation in its original context. I regard this
manoeuvre as one application of what I propose to call the Amadeus Formula. As
in the celebrated film Amadeus, about
Mozart, so in this biography of C. S. Lewis we see how a life story is
flavoured with (1) the very simplest of piquancies and (2) a widely recognized
type of profundity: the revelation of a father complex.

Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy, says Wilson, after a
publisher had asked him to explain how he passed from scepticism to religious
belief. “Minds more subtle than Lewis’s would probably have shrunk from the
attempt. And those who have made similar attempts at self-chronicling have
hedged their story about with provisos” (105-106). But elsewhere (251): “Surprised by Joy was a book which he had
been toying with for years” – which suggests a certain subtleness of mind after
all. I know nothing of this unidentified publisher as an instigator of the
book. But it is certain that Lewis, a quick writer normally, was very long in
writing it. In a letter of September 1948 he wrote, “I am at present busy with
my autobiography”;16 and in March 1949, “I hope some day to write an
autobiography which will tell what I know
(=the experience) of my conversion. But the real event, as known to God, will
differ from this as much as the total event ‘decaying tooth’ differs from the
pain.”17 His first attempts dated from about 1930. The book was
finished in 1955. By “provisos” Wilson probably means: reservations about the
possibility of perfect truthfulness in something as difficult as spiritual
autobiography. There does not seem to be much reason to reproach Lewis for
having no reservations. That reproach is simply plucked out of the air. It is
one of many cases where the success of Wilson’s book depends on the reader’s
ignorance.

But not on ignorance only.
His implicit observation that Lewis’s mind was not quite subtle enough for
spiritual autobiography is really worse than just poorly founded. It implies
that Wilson considers himself capable of assessing and comparing the subtlety
of other people’s minds – and indeed, that he considers his readers capable of this. This flattering
assumption may win over even not-so-ignorant readers to any view it invites
them to share. Wilson’s is indeed an inviting sort of cocksureness. He talks to
us about Lewis much in the way a nursery school teacher may talk to a mother
about her child. Take this sentence:

Like many (most?) religious people, Lewis was profoundly afraid of death.
(293)

– a sentence which, incidentally, is a marvel of concentrated silliness. Or
again, when Wilson in the Preface mentions his own visit to the house where
Lewis lived as a boy:

I realized that what Lewis was seeking with such painful earnestness all
his life was not to be found in this house. (xii)

– which realization is quite a confused one if only because no one has ever
suggested that Lewis was seeking anything in that house at all. Let us also
note that the idea of a lifelong and painfully earnest quest had not been
mentioned until this very passage. The quest idea and the idea about the house
are introduced not as facts, but as things which Lewis was wrong about. There
is no better illustration of Wilson’s habit of thought than this seminal piece
of confusion. He knows better, even
before he knows anything at all.

Such and similar compounds of
nonsense, confusion and instinctive condescension pervade the book: and they
could well be the very reason why it has largely supplanted other Lewis
biographies. I am not now thinking of its obvious appeal to readers with some
preconceived spite against Lewis, for I don’t think they make a large part of
Wilson’s readership for this book. What I mean is that those who have a high
regard for Lewis may find themselves adopting Wilson’s views because it seems
the surest way to avoid being such a pathetic thing as a Lewis devotee. That,
at least, was my own initial response.18

Pride goes before (and goes
on after) tremendous falls like the following one. On page 161 Wilson quotes
from a letter of Lewis an observation which, he thinks, shows a
characteristically hidebound attitude. I will not go into this matter for I am
confident that every reader of these lines will immediately see that Wilson
misinterprets them. The mistake in itself is forgivable – like most mistakes in
themselves – but is made into a serious one by two circumstances. One is that
this supposed example of hideboundness is not a mere aside, but serves to give
Wilson a leg up to his discussion of Lewis’s achievement as a Christian
apologist. The other circumstance is that Wilson says he has been thinking over
this letter, “on and off”, for twenty-two years.

This is perhaps a convenient point for a short break in my diatribe. For
although there is much to be said against this biography of C. S. Lewis,
although Wilson does not know how to combine the art of entertainment with the
art of biography so that both survive, yet in some respects it remains a good
book. It can be read by those who know nothing about Lewis, and what is more, I
know some of such readers to have gone on to read his books. Half-way through
my first reading of Wilson’s book I was myself thrilled with it and already
started recommending it. The sheer skill with which the story is built up,
every single sentence and paragraph whetting your appetite for the next, is in
itself a delight. The tone of mockery may in places be exactly right, as at the
point where Lewis flies to Greece: “...Yet here he was, signing up for a
holiday with his wife like any other twentieth-century human being” (279); and
strong language may of course be appropriate to the situation described, as I
think it is in: “The hellish responsibility of looking after an alcoholic
brother and a furiously senile old woman...” (223). There are also a number of
what I consider to be very fine remarks about Lewis’s works; for example, that
he “was to spend nearly all his literary energies imagining what the world
would look like if seen from heaven” (133), or that Lewis was “extremely good
at describing the actual territory in which the moral life, for most of us, is
thrashed out” (177), or again, that he “was by temperament in danger of turning
into a caricature backwoodsman” (197). The pages on The Abolition of Man are excellent, and infinitely superior to the
parallel passage in George Sayer’s biography.

Such episodes are, however,
too rare to save the whole. Indeed their chief function for me is to suggest
that the author must know to what extent he is bungling most of his job. This
is further suggested by the fact that some gossipy passages were silently
removed in the second edition19 – perhaps because of threated libel
suits? The large photograph of a cross-armed Wilson in that same edition does
not indicate any general doubts about the quality of his work on Lewis. In this
way, alas, my overall verdict becomes even less favourable: which explains, and
may excuse, my admittedly one-sided approach.

Wilson’s theories about Lewis’s life
– the father complex; the latent longing for his childhood days and dislike of
adulthood; rational thought as a repression mechanism – are perhaps worth
putting forward, although I tend to designate them, with a locution of
Wilson’s, as “ideas which may be better aired in talk” (173), the volatile yet
smelly lubricants of human conversation. Let us now, however, turn to Wilson’s
discussions of the books written by
Lewis. Here, too, the theories as well as the gossipy disposition have free
play. But inevitably we have advanced a good deal now into the realm of falsification.
Wilson’s discussions of the various books can all be compared with the books
themselves.

Among the theories that are
brought to bear on Lewis’s work, the one about his dislike of adulthood has
especially remarkable results. Surprised
by Joy is characterized as “really a glorious sort of comic novel.” The
unflattering portrait of Lewis’s father is considered by Wilson to be one of
the most important things in the book. The chapter in question “is one of the
funniest things written in English in the twentieth century” (252). What might
be the reason that Wilson drops into such language? My impression is that he is
simply forgetting himself in his zeal to discredit Surprised by Joy as a source of information. All the same, he is
certainly right to point out that this chapter is very funny at the expense of
Albert Lewis.20

But what about Wilson’s
observations on The Great Divorce?
This book “shows Lewis at his very best; it is something approaching a
masterpiece” (202). There are, I believe, more Lewis readers who are of this
opinion; I for one am not. As in more of his books, Lewis’s personal likes and
dislikes are here served up a little too raw to my taste. Still I believe there
may be good reasons to call it a great book. Wilson’s reason is that “the side
of his genius which, from early childhood, enjoyed ‘collecting’ the infuriating
absurdities of the grown-ups (...) here comes into its own” (202). With a
little good will we may indeed recognize this knack for creating malicious
caricatures as an aspect of Lewis’s character as a writer. And we owe a debt to
Wilson for this contribution towards a fuller understanding of Lewis.
Meanwhile, he makes the value of The
Great Divorce almost entirely dependent on this one aspect; and this, I
submit, can only point towards his own love for malicious caricatures. The
characters in this book are invariably adults; but to draw attention to this
fact is quite pointless. There is no more point in it than in saying that the
book is written in English, or that it is printed in black letters on white
paper. Lewis was not writing about adults and adulthood as such. Of course
Wilson is free to think that Lewis did so implicitly. But he makes no attempt
to make this idea plausible – and disregards most of the things which are
explicit enough and which would seem to deserve some discussion here. His
praise for The Great Divorce is
really one more example of Wilson drawing our attention away from the subject
we thought he was treating (life and works of C. S. Lewis) and towards
mere flights of fancy. He does indeed recognize in this little book “some of
the finest religious writing in the whole Lewis oeuvre”, but does not develop this observation at all (201).

Lewis’s daily work was to
speak and write about old literature. Wilson is full of praise for his
achievement in this field. His scholarly publications, Wilson emphasizes, stand
out for their exceptional readability and freshness. Wilson has read nearly
everything written in English by or about Milton, and he says “there are not
many better books than Lewis’s” (172). I have little to add to this because A Preface to Paradise Lost is nearly all
I have ever read about Milton. Wilson’s judgement does not greatly surprise me,
however. I have studied history and have not so far come across any writer who
is Lewis’s equal in making thoughts and feelings which have become wholly
“historical” nonetheless understandable and even plausible.21

The other side of the coin is
that one may well wonder if Lewis understood thoughts and feelings that are
wholly modern. I, for one, think we need not be very pessimistic about this –
if only because he apparently was familiar enough with the moderns to serve
them as an excellent expositor of the ancients. He knew on which points an old
text was apt to be misunderstood by modern readers – or indeed “apt to repel”
them, as he said in the first sentence of his first book of literary history.

Wilson thinks Lewis’s lack of
modern sentiment a real shortcoming. He talks of “a strange lack of development
in Lewis’s reading tastes” (78) and regards the fact that he “knew next to
nothing” about James Joyce as a case of “breezy refusal to follow what was
going on outside his own imaginative world and his own range of old-fashioned
reading tastes” (214).

Whether Lewis understood the
modern world is not a question that admits of a conclusive answer. Any answer
is bound to answer your taste (both for modernity and for Lewis) rather than
the question. What I am concerned with is the way Wilson links up Lewis’s
reading life with the rest of his life. Predictably, the connection is found to
lie in the childhood trauma. Lewis’s longing for his childhood days is made to
explain both his love for children’s books and what Wilson calls his “rooted
conservatism” (79). The things explained are, again, made to suit the
explanation rather than the reverse. For one thing, Wilson clearly exaggerates
the importance of Lewis’s taste for children’s literature in comparison with
his other literary loves and likings. “On one level,” says Wilson, “it is quite
a good joke (...) in the decade of Sartre’s La
Nausée and (...) Joyce’s Ulysses,
to be whooping with delight at the reprint of Adventures of Tom Pippin by Roland Zuiz [sic]” (161). We are referred for this to a letter of March 1937,
where Lewis wrote to a friend that he had “half thought of getting” this book
by Roland Quiz, but had not bought it because this friend might already have
it. No trace of any whooping here. Wilson frequently suggests that Lewis not
only liked children’s literature, but actually preferred it to all or most
other literature. Furthermore, he uses terms like “narrow”, “old-fashioned”,
“conservative” and the like to characterize Lewis’s literary tastes. Such terms
are hardly apposite – as may appear, in fact, from Wilson’s observations
elsewhere: “His aesthetic tastes remained much the same – that is to say broad”
(292), and: “There he marks himself out (...) as a pioneer of modern taste”
(145). But perhaps we should not press this contradiction. More noteworthy to
my mind is the fact that Wilson seems to think that, now that we live in modern
times, to be modern is a sign of maturity: that something must be seriously
wrong if you are not, like other people, modern: that not being modern is a
form of childishness. As if nothing more interesting could be said about
possible reasons to remain unfascinated by James Joyce.

The saddest thing about these
parts of the biography is that Wilson ignores what Lewis himself said about his
love for children’s literature. Lewis’s observations on this point22
were quite plausible; they should at least have been taken notice of in a book
that is so much focused on his relation to childhood. Wilson does not quote or
even suggest the existence of these observations. Instead he talks of Lewis’s
“attitudes and poses”, his teasing non-conformity, his habit of “rejoicing in
the limitations of his sympathy” (161). We, Wilson’s readers, are apparently
supposed to enjoy the view offered us of psychological backgrounds that Lewis did
not see, and not to bother any further with foregrounds which might make
nonsense of these backgrounds.

And the same thing happens to
what Lewis said about his own lack of modernity. His Cambridge inaugural
lecture of 1954 is treated by Wilson as little more than “indicative of the way
that he was developing at this time” (246). As Lewis is quoted from a letter to
some American children: “I am tall, fat, bald, red-faced, double-chinned,
black-haired and wear glasses for reading,” Wilson comments: “It was a juvenile
version of his Cambridge inaugural lecture” (250). This is certainly to add to
Lewis’s own humour. But it is not to convey the point of the lecture; or in so
far as it is, this point is one that Lewis was making in one form or another at
almost every stage of his public career. As he gave a concluding summary of the
inaugural lecture Lewis called this point his “settled conviction”. He had
given his view of the ways in which the modern world is fundamentally different
from all other and previous worlds. He added that he himself belonged to an
older world. The same view of the modern world underlies The Abolition of Man, written in 1943 – yet “in this book”, Wilson
says (rightly I think), “he deserves to command his widest audience”. It is “an
important book” (197). But then what about the Cambridge lecture?

The fact is that Lewis in
this biography is routinely hidden from our view as soon as he threatens to say
true things about himself: and this is what he happened to do as he was
inaugurated in Cambridge, but not in The Abolition of Man. We will find
curtains of psycho-speculation let down by Wilson wherever Lewis explains his
own relation to pre-modern times, or his love for children’s literature, or so
many other things that Wilson wants to explain.

Lewis’s works of Christian apologetics and popular theology – The Problem of Pain (1940), three little
volumes of radio talks (1942–1944), and Miracles
(1947) – come off rather badly in Wilson’s account of them. It is even
suggested that Lewis himself might have deplored the lasting popularity of
these works since “he came to feel that their method and manner were spurious”
(215). In his defence of traditional tenets of the Christian faith, says
Wilson, he indulged in a superficial, rhetorical and aggressive kind of
argument – much like the ways of his father as a police-court solicitor. The
moment of Lewis’s repentance from this – after a “Socratic” debate about Miracles – is in Wilson’s story a
dramatic climax. The climax is further developed into the high point of Lewis’s
writing career: the Narnia tales (to which we will come back presently). There
could be some truth in this representation; and some of Wilson’s objections to
particular points that Lewis made are probably justified. More generally, it
may well be true that Lewis knew too little of contemporary philosophy to
achieve all that he tried to achieve. However, truth in Wilson’s book often
gives way to exaggeration. The exaggeration most easily found out is the
suggestion that Lewis, had he lived, might have hated the lasting popularity of
this part of his oeuvre. He made new editions both of the radio talks, which
were collected in Mere Christianity
(1952), and of Miracles (1960). The
latter’s revisions and the former’s preface do not give evidence of any
repentance either from his manner in the 1940s or to what he was or did after 1950.

Another exaggeration is the
claim that Lewis was making religious faith dependent on the intellect, and
that the very attempt to do so must be seen, in him, as a sign of warped
emotions. With regard to The Problem of
Pain Wilson allows that Lewis wrote “with the best of intentions” and that
“in the context of the time, there was a sort of heroism in this” (166–167).
But apart from this context, these intentions, and its excellent readability,
the sad truth about this book is, for Wilson, that it presents the Christian
faith in a totally different way from the way it had once presented itself to
Lewis. In the book, Lewis was “trying to define, or speaking as if it were
possible to define, ‘precisely what He [i.e. Jesus Christ] meant’ by saying who
He was.” This was, in Wilson’s view, “a sort of profanity”. It was all the less
pardonable since Lewis had been led to [the faith] by his experience of the
numinous, and by the exercise of his imagination.

Above all, he had been led to it by the discovery that story, myth, could
not only carry truth, but also be
truth. Surely (...) the story of Christ was much more important than any
doctrine which a fallible or fallen human mind could extract from it? (166)

Now here is an excellent summary of Surprised
by Joy, followed by a no less excellent summary of what we might call
Lewis’s religious epistemology. The extraordinary thing about it is that Wilson
somehow contrives to believe these insights to be his own, and embezzles, as it
were, the fact that they appear implicitly or explicitly on page after page in
Lewis’s work. It is true that in the apologetic books Lewis does not pay much
explicit attention to the experiences that had led him to the faith. If the
idea to do so ever occurred to him, he probably dropped it as “too highbrow”,
anyhow as a bad idea. Nobody would have been interested. Yet now that we know
something about these experiences, it is easy to see that he did work a lot of
them into his books and talks. Their profanity, on the other hand, does not
seem to have struck very many of his readers and listeners.

It surely takes some wilful
misunderstanding to see a significant contrast between Lewis’s apologetics and
the rest of his work. His own view of the relation between the apologetic books
and the Narnia tales can be found in a letter of 1953 to a young reader: “Of
course you’re right about the Narnian books being better than the tracts; at
least, in the way a picture is better than a map.”23 Just now I
opened Mere Christianity at random
and very soon came across this:

Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger – according to the
way you react to it.24

– which sentence could, without many changes, find a place in almost any
book by Lewis: best of all in a Narnia book. I for one have never doubted that
the charm of the Narnia tales is only superficially different from the charm of
most of the other books. And it is certain that the broadcast talks of the
years 1941–1944 were found extremely edifying by a large and varied audience.
Bertrand Russell received a letter from an atheist who was in spiritual
distress as a result of hearing them.25 The talks achieved their end
to an unforeseen degree. Wilson represents the apologetic episode of Lewis’s
career as a deplorable series of faux pas.
Such a picture fits well into the psycho-drama conceived and directed by
Wilson, but has few connections with any reality outside it.

The drama reaches a climax,
and perhaps so does Wilson’s unreliability, in his treatment of the “Chronicles
of Narnia”. The origination of this series of seven children’s books is
explained directly and unambiguously from the intellectual defeat which Lewis
suffered as a defender of the Christian faith early in 1948. This defeat – in a
debate with the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe – is represented as Lewis’s
painful road toward an important perception. He came to see that the deepest truths
about God and man are not to be reached through the exercise of the rational
mind but through the imagination; and so he went on to give free rein to his
own rich imagination. His subconscious was quick to find its ideal form of
expression in the children’s tale. “It is not whimsical to say that Narnia is the inside of Lewis’s mind” (221).

Here is another good example
of an idea which may be better aired in talk. It is perhaps a clever idea but
hardly more than that. There is not the least indication, let alone evidence,
that it corresponds to the reality. The question why Lewis wrote these books,
in the sense in which it is here answered, is really unanswerable. At least I
do not know of any facts pointing to a clear answer. What Wilson presents as evidence
for his idea will on a closer view mostly be found to be no evidence at all.
What it does show is this biographer’s lack of due interest in what he is
writing about.

First he describes the impact
of the defeat on Lewis (213):

He found this debate emotionally depleting. He told George Sayer that “his
argument for the existence of God had been demolished”.

The words in quotation marks are to be found in Sayer’s book about Lewis.
On the page in question (not the one Wilson states) we read that Lewis was
“unhappy” about the debate until months after the event. His reason for this
unhappiness was, in Sayer’s words, that he felt that

in the minds of simple people, the disproof of an argument for the existence
of God tended to be seen as a disproof of the existence of God.26

– a slightly different reason from the one Wilson suggests. This inaccuracy
might not in itself be of great moment, but it is of course a characteristic
one. Lewis was thinking about simple people and about God rather than, as
Wilson suggests, about himself, and rather than “his argument”. Wilson has
further decided that what made Lewis feel so miserable was not just the defeat
but the fact that his opponent had been an adult. “He felt that he was arguing
so coherently for the existence of that Other World because he had been there
himself. And now here was a grown-up who was not convinced by his explanations
of those inner adventures” (214). It is true that he had never been defeated
like this by a child. The horror of it all, Wilson thinks, was all the worse to
Lewis because his opponent was a woman.

In order to trim all these
wild ideas back into a truer view of the matter, it may indeed not be enough to
go back to George Sayer’s account. Elizabeth Anscombe has written that

the meeting of the Socratic club at which I read my paper has been
described by several of [Lewis’s] friends as a horrible and shocking experience
which upset him very much. (...) My own recollection is that it was an occasion
of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis’s
rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined to
construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends – who seem not
to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject matter – as an
interesting example of the phenomenon called “projection”.27

Reading the Narnia tales is
to Wilson like reading the mind of Lewis. His discussion of them is largely a
matter of pointing out two sources for these stories: first, Lewis’s childhood
experiences and nostalgia for his early years; second, his defeat as a defender
of Christianity and undying itch for metaphysical certainties. The longest
quotation is a passage from The Silver
Chair, where Puddleglum maintains against the Queen (or Witch) of
Underland, and against an increasing appearance of the contrary, that Underland
(where he then is) is not the whole of the world. This passage, Wilson
says, “is a nursery nightmare version of Lewis’s debate with Miss Anscombe”
(226). He suggests connections between the life and the works of Lewis none of
which can be either proved or disproved. In one case, to be sure, he seems to
score half a point. Susan’s fate in The
Last Battle does suggest, as Wilson says, that “growing up” is an
“unforgivable sin” (228). However, Susan’s idea of growing up is clearly
intended to be seen as a wrong idea –
in fact, as childishness.

This picture of the inside of
Lewis’s mind is (1) incomplete and (2) not unique to the Narnia books. To start
with the latter point: A scene very much like the one between Puddleglum and
the Queen of Underland can be found in a book from the period when Lewis was
scoring his greatest triumphs, supposed or real, as a Christian apologist – in
chapter XV.4 of That Hideous Strength
(1945). A complete survey of all such parallels in the works of Lewis would
probably spoil rather than increase our reading pleasure (parallels are not
intended for surveys, I think); but it would show that his characteristic ideas
and images are strewn quite evenly all over his works.

There is, however, at least
one very important idea or image that is absent from this sketch of Lewis’s
inner self. In 1988 an American schoolboy, having read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and apparently not aware that Lewis had been dead for
twenty-five years, wrote a letter to tell him

I thought that the lion played a great part in your story and made it
interesting...28

The part played by the lion, Aslan, seems to have escaped Wilson’s notice.
In the chapter on Narnia, Aslan is only mentioned in passing on two occasions
(220, 229). Of all the innumerable cases of sloppiness in Wilson’s book, this
one is perhaps the least pardonable. For if there is any single point at which
Lewis’s life and work converge, it is the point where, having already started
on his first Narnia book, Lewis found this great lion bursting in on his
imaginary world. Describing Narnia while leaving out Aslan is about as useful
as making a passport photo of a person wearing sunglasses.

A parallel can be drawn, I
think, between Wilson’s treatment of the Narnia books and that of Surprised by Joy. In the latter book he
ignored the spiritual drama by trying to reduce it to psycho-drama. Lewis
explained that “Joy” turned out to have its origin outside himself and that
this surprised him. Wilson fails or refuses to understand this, yet pretends to
understand everything perfectly. His gaze is fixed on “the inside of the mind
of Lewis”. It therefore misses all that has its origin outside. And that,
perhaps, is how he contrives to ignore Aslan. The American schoolboy in his
ignorance may have understood Lewis better, I suspect, than this biographer
laureate. To avoid this suspicion, Wilson should at least have explained why
the first of the Narnia tales was not called The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Yet it is debatable whether
the biography has here actually reached its nadir. Wilson’s lack of interest in
Lewis is perhaps still more blatant at a point where it is hardly noticeable.
Lewis’s favourite among his own novels was Till
we have Faces. For a biographer it would be wise to treat a fact like this
in the way Mozart’s biographer Alfred Einstein did. Mozart once wrote in a
letter that he considered a particular composition as the best thing he had
ever written. Einstein: “Now there must have been some grounds for such an
opinion” – and then these grounds are pointed out (and found to be good).29
What does Wilson say about Till we have
Faces? Nothing. The book is briefly mentioned on two occasions in
connection with what he thinks is an increasing introspectiveness in Lewis, and
that is all.

The last Wilsonian critique I
will discuss here is the one on A Grief
Observed – the collection of diary notes which Lewis wrote after the death
of his wife in 1960. Wilson plays it off against the other books. “This was the
real thing”, he writes (285), as Lewis seems finally to admit that nothing much
can be said about God and about metaphysics generally. In the books he wrote
twenty years before, Lewis had been assuming that very much indeed could be
said about God. The first milestone on his road to truth and wisdom was Narnia,
the second and last was A Grief Observed
– in Wilson’s story.

This line of development has
its undeniable merits as a narrative device. And there is surely a unique force
to the way Lewis here expressed his heightened awareness that no human
language, hoewever brilliant, can solve for us the practical problem of
pain, or can convey more than a caricature of God or of anything. But this
awareness is really never absent in his books. It is present at least from The
Problem of Pain’s preface onwards. A biographical scheme in which it is
absent all the time and does not break through until the end cannot be the
result of attentive reading. Wilson’s view of A Grief Observed might be
a case of what Lewis in a different context called “that pernicious criticism
which tries to recommend one excellence by depreciating another”.30
Certainly it is one more case of Wilson slanting the facts to fit his chosen
scheme.

The wonderful readability of this biography and its occasional fine
observations cannot redeem it. Sloppiness, cocksureness and sheer gossip: these
are its three main factors. Without these, indeed without any single one of
these, Wilson would have been unable to complete his job as biographer of
C. S. Lewis. I will pass the three factors under separate final review,
using a brief phrase (in my italics) from a passage already quoted:

She [Mrs Moore] was persistent in trying to do unnecessary tasks, thereby
forcing Jack, out of guilt, to do
them himself. (75)

Usually, the easy way to detect Wilson’s sloppiness is simply to compare his account with the sources. In
this case, in checking the relevant passage in Lewis’s diary, we found that
there was no question of Lewis feeling any guilt about Mrs Moore’s hard work
even though, for his part, he was idling away his day. He tried to stop her.
But there is more sloppiness to the passage. On a syntactically strict view of
this sentence, it would seem to be Mrs Moore who felt guilty, rather than Jack.
Not that this will be any reader’s view. Yet now that we know this guilt thing
to be a fabrication, the wobbly syntax gains significance. It can now be seen
as a symptom of a larger carelessness, and indeed tastelessness. For as we
conclude that the “out of guilt” phrase is an atmospheric element somewhat
hastily added, we soon discover that it is just one more item in a jumble of
cheap ornaments – obsession, compulsion, guilt, and what not – from the modern
novelist’s junk room. Any real pondering over the correct position of this
short phrase within the sentence would lead to its being not shifted but cut
out. But then the whole sentence would soon follow. And that would be the
beginning of the end for the whole book. As Dr Johnson said of journalism as a
profession, contempt of shame and
indifference to truth are absolutely necessary.31 It is a book
for readers who will spend as little time and genuine attention on the subject
as Wilson apparently did: a book for the reviewing establishment (“the
definitive biography” – John Bailey, Guardian;
“full of compassion and insight” – Michael Holroyd; “his best yet” – Andrew Motion,
Observer; and so on and so forth) and
for all those who follow their lead. Above all, it is a book for booksellers. The Show of Art without the Power.

Comparisons can be made not only
with what the sources tell us, but with other biographies. Wilson’s cocksureness – second factor – becomes
painfully clear when you compare his Lewis biography, for example, with Bernard
Crick’s biography of George Orwell. In his introduction, Crick explains his own
misgivings about “much of the fine writing, balanced appraisal and
psychological insight that is the hallmark of the English tradition of
biography”:

It may be pleasant to read, but readers should realize that often they are
being led by the nose, or that the biographer is fooling himself by an affable
pretence of being able to enter into another person’s mind (...) and this all
done so elegantly that neither contradictions nor gaps in the evidence are
apparent to any but scholarly eyes carefully reading the footnotes or cynically
noting their lack. None of us can enter into another person’s mind; to believe
so is fiction.

Some form of character sketch is unavoidable and indeed imperative, says
Crick, but this had best be done by offering “rival contemporary
characterizations” and in any case

without abandoning the evidence and the chronicle of events for the
seductive short-cuts and pseudo-certainties even of “empathy”, still less of
literary psychoanalysis.32

The result of Crick’s method – of his “stress on externality” – amazed me.
His is a very fat and sometimes indigestible book; but those who read on will
get impressions of George Orwell that are very much like impressions that you
get from acquaintance with living people. That is, you will be left with
memories of a number of images, scenes and utterances that have struck you for
personal, perhaps unexplainable reasons. In Wilson’s book an Explanation reigns
supreme, bending and twisting nearly everything to an alleged need to be explained
– by It. This Explanation is a psychological fantasy. Even supposing that this
particular fantasy corresponded to some important reality and supposing the
illustrations were recognizably drawn from life – to know a man through
such a book would still be very different from knowing him in real life. This
book does not attempt an approximation of real-life acquaintance at all. Rather
it is like a ritual quite thoughtlessly performed on writers whose books have
reached certain sales figures. This is the Biographication of C. S. Lewis.
When I want to get to know someone, I usually attend as well as I can to what
that person thinks fit to let me know, and do not normally try to bypass him or
her and delve into his or her early youth, or into any other matters which I
will anyhow never learn much about. Who, in fact, has ever been looking forward
to these stale and rambling speculations about the unconscious inner life of
C. S. Lewis? It is astonishing that this kind of thing should be widely
hailed as the last word in critical subtlety. One of the keener reviewers, the
Dutch literary critic Kees Fens, wrote at the end of his piece on this book,
“It would be better for a writer not to have had any childhood, at least not a
happy or an unhappy one. And certainly no untimely deceased mother.”33
The pointlessness, the silliness and the cocksureness of a phrase like this
“out of guilt” becomes almost impressive if you try to give it a place in the Orwell
biography. It will find no place there. “An honest biographer must be more dull
than he could be,” says Crick, promising not to indulge in “seductive
short-cuts and pseudo-certainties”. And: The more a subject has been treated in
unreliably entertaining biographies, the fatter and duller an honest one has to
be. And surely this is why Crick’s first chapter is particularly long and
tedious: it is about Orwell’s early years.

Truth often has to deal in dull negations, unlike the glittering results of
intuition and characterology.34

Writers like Wilson can produce more nonsense in ten words than can be
dismissed in dozens of pages of dull negation. “Bread of deceit is sweet to a
man,” as the Book of Proverbs says, “but afterwards his mouth shall be filled
with gravel.”

Obviously, Crick’s method is
not the only acceptable one. Fantasy is a legitimate pursuit in itself; and the
psychologizing approach cannot be simply equated with cocksureness.35
But then readers must not be fooled about what they are in for. Wilson has told
us at the end of his Preface that he would

try to be realistic, not only because reality is more interesting than
fantasy, but also because we do Lewis no honour to make him into a plaster
saint. And he deserves our honour.

He cannot be said to have failed in his attempt to be realistic: he has
made no such attempt at all.

A similar criticism applies
to the third factor, gossip. The
malicious caricature as a literary form deserves its place under the sun, for
all I care. I would not like the idea of a taboo on it. We would therefore
perhaps be wise to judge Wilson’s book by another standard than Crick’s
example. A more suitable standard would seem to be, for example, Lytton
Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. I
happened to read that book shortly after the Lewis biography, and was struck by
the likeness of the two works. Strachey’s prose, too, is brilliant. And his
scathing portrayals of Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and the others
make you really believe – for a while – that these people stood out for their
bad qualities rather than for anything else. Histories of English literature
tend to tell us that Strachey had many imitators but that none of these were
his equal in his own field. Wilson can, I think, be reasonably regarded as a
late case of Strachey-imitation. Viewed this way, his fantasies about guilt
feelings, repressions, obsessions, irremediable injuries, traumas, horrors and
people moving to and fro fall more or less into place. But the great difference
between Wilson and Strachey is, of course, the size of this Lewis biography and
the corresponding pretence of solid work. The book has over 300 pages and as
many footnotes, as well as illustrations, “Acknowledgements”, a “Select
Bibliography”, and an index; in brief, it looks completely genuine. Meanwhile
Strachey’s idea of good biography was that

the method of enormous and elaborate accretion which produced the Life of Johnson [and, we may add,
Crick’s George Orwell] is excellent,
no doubt; but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have the pure
essentials – a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations,
transitions, commentaries, or padding.36

Wilson makes it appear as if his Life of Lewis is based on much preparatory
work and careful study. Thus in a footnote on page 176 he reproaches another
biographer of Lewis for “a strange assertion (among many other inaccuracies)”.
And still another biographer’s account of the chronology of the Narnia stories
has been diagnosed by Wilson to be “slightly confused” (219). Lytton Strachey
would never write such things. Wilson ought to have refrained from it. Unless
the sham is deliberate, his book is Strachey’s “half-measure”.37 The
clownish figures, the boozers and buffoons, the skirt-chasers, scatterbrains
and sundry neurotics appearing in his book are good enough as second-rate
satire, but it is wrong for Wilson to suggest that he is interested in what he
is satirizing. His view of Lewis perhaps deserves a moment’s attention. But not
for longer than a page or two.

What then, it might be finally asked, is the good of spending so many more
pages on it?

Wolfgang Hildesheimer in his
biography of Mozart observed that “surely, where anecdote is spreading, truth
becomes hard to find.” Even more relevant to my present purpose is what he says
about “that view which [Mozart’s] sister Nannerl phrased in seemingly perennial
words: that he remained, except in his music, a child all his life.” This view,
says Hildesheimer, was not so much perceptive as simply nice to repeat.38
The same would seem to be true of Wilson’s idea that Lewis remained a child all
his life.39 A strong indication of this is the review, already
referred to, which my compatriot Kees Fens wrote about this book. Fens is a
doyen of Dutch literary criticism and was distinguished by the Netherlands
Society for English Studies for his articles on English literature in the daily
newspaper de Volkskrant. His review
is in a way unique. I don’t think Kees Fens is a Lewis specialist and he leaves
us in no doubt that he dislikes Lewis. Unlike other established reviewers,
however, he had no difficulty seeing through the hollowness of the way Wilson
went about this biography. All the more telling is the fact that Fens accepts
his view of Lewis. “The naïvety which I suspected in Lewis seems undeniable,”
he writes, having just shown us why it is
deniable if you are to go by Wilson.40

Again, Norman F. Cantor in
his book on twentieth-century medievalists notes that Wilson’s biography of
Lewis is “more hostile” than its predecessors. He appears to be unimpressed by
Wilson’s unctuous introductory words about the need for realism and about Lewis
deserving our honour. All the same, the only detail which Cantor directly
borrows from any of the four available biographies is that

there is a coterie of fanatical Lewis disciples among English
Anglo-Catholics, who hold frequent cult meetings at Oxford. According to
A. N. Wilson, this group dogmatically insists that Lewis never lost his
virginity.41

Cantor clearly wants to keep his distance from Wilson. He probably finds it
as hard to believe Wilson as I found it. But the pleasure of repeating (and
embroidering) a detail like this seems to override all other considerations.
The Perpetual Virginity idea and many more of Wilson’s ideas may have a future
before them that is well described by what Hildesheimer said about the idea of
Mozart’s being a child all his life:

The contention haunts the entire literature, condescendingly amiable and in
a welcome way sweetly poisonous, and will be dogging him forever.

It may be doubted whether Wilson’s will prove to be the definitive
biography of C. S. Lewis. If it does, it will be definitive in the way
that such sweet poison is. I have been trying to provide, for this and for any
similar book, a definitive antidote – so that we may stop calling this kind of
writing “controversial” and start calling it fraud. If that sounds ambitious,
the attempt may at least have given new force to Pope’s next two lines about
writing ill and judging ill: But, of the two, less dangerous is the offence
/ To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.

_____________________

Notes

An earlier version of this essay, in Dutch, was published in Bloknoot
No. 8 (May 1994) under the title ‘Het raadsel
der leesbaarheid’. The above English text was last revised on 9
November 2004.

1.I am referring in this
essay to A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Collins,
London 1990) and to the paperback edition (HarperCollins / Flamingo, London
1991), i.e. to the British editions; I have seen no American ones. The latest
American paperback edition was published by Norton, New York, in 2002.
Comparing the British first (hardcover) and second (paperback) editions I found
the following two differences:

(a) Page 203, ll. 4–6 of the first edition has: “It was Minto
who finally decided that June, the intensity of whose feelings for Jack was now
obvious, should go.” – This was re­placed by: “It was June’s father who finally
said that she must go.”

(b) Page 256, last paragraph until the end on the next page in
the first edition has: “According to an oral memory of Joy’s son Douglas,
transcribed in the Marion E. Wade collection at Wheaton College, Illinois, the
two of them were already lovers in 1955. Douglas on one occasion came into his
mother’s bedroom at 10 Old High Street and found it occupied by Jack and Joy in
a compromising position. This memory, which transpired during a conversation
between Douglas Gresham and Lyle W. Dorsett, is not repeated in either of the
books which the two men have written about the Lewis marriage, and it is not
clear whether the omission is because Gresham distrusts the memory (he was
eight years old at the time) or because it was considered indelicate to imply
that the union between Lewis and his future wife was consummated, as would
appear to have been the case, before they were married.” – This was replaced in
the second edition by: “Just as in the early stages of his involvement with
Minto, Lewis positively revelled in a situation where others might have
regarded him as a victim who was being exploited. There is an emotional paradox
here which his friends, very understandably, were slow to perceive. Knowing how
important their friendship was to Lewis, and indeed how self-conscious he was
in his celebrations of it, they found it doubly puzzling and wounding that he
should have selected as his consort a woman whom they found so intensely un­ap­pealing.
They did not realize that, for Lewis, this represented a large part of Joy’s
charm. He needed a love which threatened to upset or even to destroy the very
fabric of his life. His love for Minto challenged the two great facts of his
situation in 1919: his family and his academic career. Now that he was on his
own once more, secure in his career and settled in his friendships, it was as
if he needed to take some step which would alienate and destroy the things and
the people that made him happy.”

These two examples, against the background of all that has not
been changed but reprinted as an allegedly definitive biography, seem
sufficient proof of both the author’s and the pub­lisher’s bad faith. I have
therefore decided I could spend my time better than compiling a full list of
discrepancies between the first and second editions.

2.o.c., 242, about
Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). I am
borrowing the term “publicity intellectual” from Saul Bellow’s essay “Culture
Now” (1971), reprinted in The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository
Prose, third edition (1973).

3.Douglas Gresham, “Worth
Words Perhaps?”, Chesterton Review Vol. XVIII No. 3/4 (August 1991),
372–277. This is one of the two (or more?) passages that were changed in the
second edition – see my Note 1. See also Lyle Dorsett’s review, “Another
Biography of C. S. Lewis” (in its published form not in my possession).
Dorsett was director of the Wade Center in Wheaton at the time when Wilson visited
it. Wilson spent, says Dorsett, less than three hours there.

4.It was not until later
that I read Hooper’s Past Watchful Dragons (1971): “Lewis lost his vir­ginity
while a pupil at Cherbourg House...” (20). Still later I found that Hooper was
one of two people at whose suggestion Wilson wrote this book and that Wilson is
“very grateful to them both for the trust which this invitation implied” (C. S.
Lewis, 311).

5.Fount paperback edition.

6.Joy here has a
very special meaning, to which I will come back later.

6a.With respect both to this
and to the following paragraph, it is worth looking further into the case of
Macdonald and study his relationship, not to his dead mother, but to his
father. The contrast with Lewis could not be greater. See, for example, this
passage from Macdonald’s sermon “Abba, Father!” (available online):

There may be among my readers– alas for such! – to whom the word Father
brings no cheer, no dawn, in whose heart it rouses no tremble of even a
vanished emotion. It is hardly likely to be their fault. For though as children
we seldom love up to the mark of reason; though we often offend; and although
the conduct of some children is inexplic­able to the parent who loves them;
yet, if the parent has been but ordinarily kind, even the son who has grown up
a worthless man, will now and then feel, in his better mo­ments, some dim
reflex of childship, some faintly pleasant, some slightly sorrowful re­membrance
of the father around whose neck his arms had sometimes clung. In my own
childhood and boyhood my father was the refuge from all the ills of life, even
sharp pain itself. Therefore I say to son or daughter who has no pleasure in the
name Father, “You must interpret the word by
all that you have missed in life. Every time a man might have been to you a
refuge from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in
a weary land, that was a time when a father might have been a father indeed.
Happy you are yet, if you have found man or woman such a re­fuge; so far have
you known a shadow of the perfect, seen the back of the only man, the perfect
Son of the perfect Father. All that human tenderness can give or desire in the
nearness and readiness of love, all and infinitely more must be true of the
perfect Father – of the maker of fatherhood,
the Father of all the fathers of the earth, specially the Father of those who
have specially shown a father-heart.”

8.George Sayer, Jack:
C. S. Lewis and His Times (London, Macmillan 1988), 220–221 (cap. 19).
Between Sayer’s “some laundry” and Wilson’s “a pile of Jack’s laundry” the
missing link is provided by Lyle Dorsett in his biography of Joy Davidman,
where she is carrying “Jack’s laundry” (Joy and C. S. Lewis,
HarperCollins, London 1994, 118; originally pub­lished as And God Came In,
Macmillan, New York 1983).

9.A term which Wilson
borrows from John Henry Newman

10.Wilson aptly remarks that
Lewis “was impishly choosing [a] title [i.e. Surprised by Joy] which by
then was charged for him with double meaning” (252).

11.The book’s last words are
a quote from Walter Hilton’s Ladder of Perfection.

12.This, incidentally, is
almost the only reference to the Bible in all Surprised by Joy.

13.For a good discussion of Surprised
by Joy (preceded by a section about Bede Griffths and followed by one about
Newman) see A. O. J. Cockshut, The Art of Autobiography in 19th & 20th
Century England (Yale U.P., 1984), 203–209: “The key to Lewis’s story is
well stated by himself: ‘I have been a converted pagan living among apostate
Puritans’”; “The stock distinction between feeling and thinking people is not
applicable to him”; “I pass lightly over his encounter with idealist
metaphysics, about which I am not competent to speak”; “...his conversion to
Christianity ... clearly occured at a level where this most articulate of men
could not translate it into discursive thought”; “The real interest of his book
lies in the gradual convergence of two streams of thought supposed to be
flowing far apart towards different oceans – joy and thought.”

17.Bodleian Library, MS Eng.
lett. 220/4, fol. 76; the parenthetical gloss is Lewis’s. In the same letter experience
is defined as “that part or result of any event which is presented to con­scious­ness”.

18.The Church Times
reviewer wrote that Wilson has “rescu[ed] Lewis from his mytholo­gizers”. Leon
Edel, too, spoke of a rescue (see review excerpts in the second edition).

19.Cf. Note 1.

20.But perhaps the very best
thing Lewis wrote in this vein is to be found in a letter to his brother, 21
December 1929, about his uncles Dick and Bill on the day of his father’s
funeral (Letters, revised edition, London, Collins 1988).

21.We probably have a
valuable comment on Wilson’s treatment of Lewis the medievalist in Norman
Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great
Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (William Morrow and Co., New York
1991): “Wilson also attempts a critical evaluation of Lewis’s work as a
medievalist, which shows both what a quick study Wilson is and how little he
knows about the Middle Ages and the modern inter­pretation of it” (430).

22.To be found chiefly in
the collection Of This and Other Worlds, ed. W. Hooper (Collins, London
1984), now included in Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short
Stories, ed. Lesley Walmsley (HarperCollins, London 2000).

23.18 December 1953. Letters
to Children (Collins, London 1985), 36.

24.Mere Christianity
(Geoffrey Bles, London 1952), cap. I.5.

25.Letter printed in Dear
Bertrand Russell (1969) and mentioned in C. S. Lewis: An Annotated
Checklist of Writings about him and his Works, ed. J. R. Christopher and J.
K. Ostling (Kent State University Press 1972), 145.

26.Sayer, o.c., 186
(cap. 16).

27.Quoted by Richard Purtill
from her introduction to a reprint of this paper in her Collected
Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (1981). R. L. Purtill, “Did C. S. Lewis
lose his faith?” in A Christian for All Christians: Essays in Honour of
C. S. Lewis, ed. A. Walker and J. Patrick (Hodder & Stoughton,
London 1990), 51. See also Walter Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter” in C. S.
Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como
(new edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego etc. 1992), 137–185 and
especially 161 ff.

35.The possibility of a
heavily Freudian approach going together with genuine repect for a writer and
every word he wrote is proved by W. Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel John­son.
(“With touching historical naïveté, our minds leap to sex – in biographies if
not in sober histories – at the mere mention of anything connected with either
‘secrecy’ or ‘guilt’ in any human being from the ancient Greeks to the end of
the eighteenth century” – Samuel John­son, Harcourt Brace, New York and
London 1975, p. 385.)

37.“Deliberate sham” is a
serious insinuation. I am happy to be able to mention yet another possibility,
based on Wilson’s own testimony in The London Daily Telegraph of 14
Novem­ber 1998 (quoted by Richard James in an internet article called “Lewis in the Dock”). Wil­son there tells us
that writing Lewis’s biography “turned me into a very definite non-belie­ver”.
Remembering Wilson’s astonishing feats of muddle-headedness, I find it
difficult to think that this has been a one-way process. Wilson’s confession
must be sup­plemented by a frank suspicion that it has also been the other way
round – that Wilson’s maturing unbelief has turned him into a very definite
charlatan, at least where his work on Lewis is concerned. For if we rule out
conscious swindle, the alternative supposition must be that the
muddle-headedness has been authentic, which in view of its enormity is harder
to believe. Com­pas­sion might therefore be more in place here than suspicions
of wilful fraud. All the same, the case of A. N. Wilson and C. S.
Lewis may serve to warn future cultured despisers of reli­gion, of Lewis, or of
both, for this very real danger of making a fool of oneself. As one of the
knowledgeable sort of reviewers wrote: “Some kind friend should perhaps have
warned him to handle Lewis with greater caution or not al all” (Christopher
Derrick in New Oxford Re­view, May 1990). I confine these considerations
to a footnote be­cause my subject is Biog­raphy, not Wilson. It might still
have been worth my while to read Wilson’s next biography, the one on Jesus
(1994), if only to find out whether the life of Jesus is likewise found to ex­plain
“the Jesus phenomenon”, i.e. Christianity. The cover illu­stration – Jesus
clasping pierced hands before his eyes as if in horror at seeing that pheno­menon
– suggests a different approach.

39.Lewis recorded in his
diary the moment when this very idea about Mozart reached him through a friend;
his reply, that he “thought nothing could be more delightful”, is in Wil­son’s
view “disarmingly revealing” (81).

In an article
titled “Why I believe again” in the New Statesman of 2 April 2009, A. N.
Wilson has publicized his slow, but now definite, recon­ver­sion to Chris­tianity.
A more popular article to the same effect appeared in the Daily Mail of 11
April.

Implicitly but unmistakably, much of
Wilson’s past career is here discredited. Signif­icant parts or aspects of his
output in the past two decades must now be viewed as a product of his very
swift con­ver­sion to atheism in the late 1980s – which he describes in
retrospect as “a bit of middle-aged mad­ness”. The swiftness alone, Wilson
explains, should have warned him that he, “by nature a doubting Thomas”, was on
a wrong track. As he confesses, the “creed that religion can be despatched in a
few brisk arguments and then laughed off kept me going for some years.”

Reviewing one’s own life in this way
must be a painful exper­ience. What is worse, for the rest of us and possibly
for Wilson, is that he has kept count­less readers going that way. Cer­tainly
he has done so in his biography of C. S. Lewis. The continuing effect of his
prose was recently exemplified in the Oxford
Dic­tionary of National Biography as it published a revised article on
Lewis in 2008. The reviser’s chief in­spi­ra­tion has evidently been Wilson’s
biography. And sure enough, at the end of the article his book is mentioned as
one of the two “most serious studies” – with an obsolete German book of 1974 as
the other.

No reflections on this awkward
situation are offered by Wilson. In­stead, the photo pub­lished with the NewStatesman
article shows him as clinging, in a curi­ously literal sense, to the ways
he pro­fesses to be aban­doning. He is holding a book whose front jacket is
partly in view. It appears to be a book on jesus.
On closer inspec­tion, it turns out to be Wilson’s own biography of Jesus,
which was pub­lished two years after the one on Lewis. I have that book in
front of me now. On the jacket’s backside, snip­pets are quoted from the praise
lavished by many reviewers on the Lewis book of 1990. The em­bar­rassing nature
of this praise (“he cuts through all the pious cackle to the heart of the mat­ter”
etc.) must now be evident for Wil­son. I have never seen fit to spend time on
his Jesus book; but I am quite sure that it represents Wil­son’s old creed in
full flower. His posing with that book is a mys­tery. Perhaps it is best
explained as an un­for­tunate idea. At any rate it is only posing.

There are some real grounds, however, for
serious doubt about the public meaning of Wil­son’s per­sonal turn­around. Five
years ago, when the return to Chris­tianity must have been well under way, he
wrote a TLS review (6 May 2004) of Lewis’s Collected
Letters, volume 2. The Wilson who wrote that review was, to put it briefly,
still quite indis­tinguishable from the one who had writ­ten the Lewis
biography fifteen years ear­lier. What is more, the recent New Statesman piece about his own reconversion features the same
old semi-novelistic allurements to gossip which we have found to be so perverse
in the C. S. Lewis biography. It is now aimed at the atheists. The account
of a conversation with prominent atheist Christopher Hit­chens simply can’t be
trusted to tell us anything about Christopher Hitchens.

Again, some time after announcing his
re­conversion Wilson wroteanother TLS review
(17 July 2009), dis­cus­sing a volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters: and here is
yet another a piece of sardonic sneering, apparently based on wide and solid
reading. I am not in a position to judge any comments on Isaiah Berlin. But the
editors of the Berlin letters, Henry Hardy and Jennifer Homes of Wolfson Col­lege,
Oxford, soon wrote a telling reply (TLS, 29 July 2009). It is eerily re­min­is­cent
of how the Lewis biography was received in 1990 by anyone at all fami­liar with
the subject:

Sir, – It would be inappropriate (though
tempting) for us, as the editors of the second volume of Isaiah Berlin’s let­ters,
to take issue with the bizarre and petulant judge­ments in A. N. Wil­son’s
review. But so many of the points he makes are based on fac­tual errors that
some cor­rection is needed.To begin with compara­tively trivial exam­ples [etc.]. (..) More
significant is Wilson’s accu­sa­tion that Berlin’s thought did not develop over
time. [etc.] (...) The accusation of bad edit­ing on our part comes ill from
one who misquotes and garbles so often (we spare readers the de­tails); and we
are un­moved by his spe­cific exam­ples. [...] Berlin was no saint, certainly,
but he de­serves (as do your readers) a more thoughtful, bal­anced assessment
than he was given in your pages on this occa­sion.

Nevertheless, Wilson’s volte-face of April 2009 does inspire
some hope not only for him, but for the public which he has in some ways been
serving so badly for many years. In the New
States­man article, the per­petual mocking mode has found a new victim not
only in the atheists but, at last, in Wilson’s very own self. He appears really
can­did about his own intel­lectual snob­bery and how it got him on the path of
unconvinced and unconvincing atheism. Inter­est­ingly for readers of his book
on C. S. Lewis, we are told that at some early point in his atheist career
Wilson was “almost yell­ing that reading Mere
Christianity made me a non-belie­ver”. Nobody should be surprised, in fact,
to find Wilson one day yelling out his admi­ra­­tion and grateful­ness for Mere Chris­tian­ity. For now, he urges
us to “read Pastor Bon­hoef­fer’s book Ethics,
and ask your­self what sort of mad world is created by those who think that
ethics are a pure­ly human con­struct.” This is surely one of C. S. Lewis’s key
ideas, con­veyed force­fully in Mere
Chris­tianity from the very first lines on­wards. That book may still not
be to Wil­son’s taste; but then there is The
Abo­lition of Man, which he already recog­nized as “an impor­tant book” back
in his early atheist days. Also, Lewis has much to say about snob­bery as a
major force pushing people in regrettable direc­tions.

No more Damascus-like conversions for
Wilson, however. He is very clear about that. And indeed there would seem to be
a long way to go if only for his all-round credibility to improve. What would
help is a long, dull, exhaustive and, for God’s sake, accu­rate book in which
he offers detailed recantations of the sweetly-poi­son­ous non­sense he has
been pub­lishing to gratify modern main­stream secular­­ism. Or would that be
going too far in the way of reconversion? The photo published with Wil­son’s
con­fes­sion is not just mys­ter­ious. It is also un­can­nily like a picture in
one of the Chil­dren’s Bibles I was brought up with. It is a pic­ture of the
Pharisee thank­ing God that he was not as other men are. The perfect snob. Next
to it was a picture of the publi­can who would not so much as lift up his eyes
unto heaven.